Relativity and Cosmology

Black Holes, Unicorns, and All That Jazz

The notion of black holes voraciously gobbling up matter, twisting spacetime into
contortions that trap light, stretching the unwary into long spaghetti-like strands as they
fall inward to ultimately collide and merge with an infinitely dense point-mass
singularity, has become a mantra of the astrophysical community, so much so that even
primary-school children know about the sinister black hole, waiting patiently, like the
Roman child's Hannibal, for an opportunity to abduct the unruly and the misbehaved.
There are almost daily reports of scientists claiming that they have again found black
holes again here and there. It is asserted that black holes range in size from micro to mini,
to intermediate and on up through to supermassive behemoths. Black holes are glibly
spoken of and accepted as scientific facts and it is routinely claimed that they have been
detected at the centres of galaxies. Images of black holes having their wicked ways with
surrounding matter are routinely included with reports of them. Some physicists even
claim that black holes will be created in particle accelerators, such as the Large Hadron
Collider, potentially able to swallow the Earth, if care is not taken in their production. Yet
despite all this hoopla, contrary to the assertions of the astronomers and astrophysicists of
the black hole community, nobody has ever found a black hole, anywhere, let alone
'imaged' one. The pictures adduced to convince are actually either artistic impressions
(i.e. drawings) or photos of otherwise unidentified objects imaged by telescopes and
merely asserted to be due to black holes, ad hoc.

Submission history

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